“If there is one reason to see this occasionally unfocused film it’s her masterful performance.”

“Faces say so much, but only if you look at them for a really long time.”

Austrian director Marie Kreutzer’s latest, Gentle Monster, opens with Léa Seydoux trying to learn Charles & Eddie’s one-hit wonder ‘Would I Lie To You?’ on the piano. It will not be the last musical cue that is so on the nose it bleeds. Firmly focused on emotional depth and psychological aftermath, and staying away from any sort of thematic thread, Gentle Monster is a film that is mostly a showcase for Seydoux’s excellent ability to cry. The unwillingness to truly examine the titular monster, Seydoux’s film husband Philip (Laurence Rupp), is perhaps born out of a desire to make it about the victim and not the perpetrator, as these stories so often are. Or because of a genuine interest in the psychology that makes it so difficult to let go of the man you love despite his grievous wrongdoing. Either way, it leaves the film with little to chew on. Add in a muddled parallel tale about one of the police investigators on Philip’s case that seems to hint at another monster, and maybe all men being monsters, and you have a film that doesn’t linger and generates more interest because of its backstory than because of what is on screen.

Philip and Lucy Weiss seem to have it all. She is a successful solo artist performing and reshaping songs by others (exclusively written by male songwriters), and he is a TV actor and former documentarist who is on the backswing after a burnout. They have a wonderful kid, Johnny (Malo Blanchet), and a gorgeous, newly renovated home in Bavaria’s countryside. It’s bliss, until one day the police show up in full force with a search warrant to go through Philip’s phone and laptop. It’s unclear to Lucy what her husband is being investigated for, until a sign in the police station’s elevator hits her like a freight train: child pornography.

Lucy immediately moves out of their home, taking Johnny with her to her mother (Catherine Deneuve). Yet there are still functions they will have to show up at together and act as if nothing’s wrong: a friend’s wedding, her father-in-law’s birthday. It becomes increasingly difficult for Lucy to hold her tongue, especially when his stories unravel one by one: first it was research for a documentary, then the excuse was that he did it to finance their new home. The burning question for Lucy is if Philip ever did something to their son, all the while having to reconcile with the fact that this is the man she loved, and perhaps still loves. “You must accept that you didn’t know him at all,” one character tells her. But that’s hard; was it all a lie?

The film ends with Lucy getting perhaps an answer, but the audience is mostly left with questions. Why, for instance, do we also have to follow the tribulations of investigator Elsa (Jella Haase) and her gruff father Hermann (Sylvester Groth), a mentally troubled man living in the past, and consistently harassing his live-in caretaker. There are faint parallels of toxic male behavior between Philip and Hermann, but Kreutzer never manages to truly connect the dots on this point, so the audience is left with a second storyline that could have been a film in its own right, but has no real business mixing itself into this tale of trust, betrayal, and the difficulty of coping with the idea that your life has been a lie. Kreutzer’s direction is austere, although comparisons to Haneke are too easily thrown around; the Austrian master would never mirror two bath scenes in which Lucy is respectively washing the hair of her son and that of her father, for instance. It’s exactly these touches that breathe life into Gentle Monster, but Kreutzer allows herself too few of these flourishes, which makes the film seem like going through the motions.

Although Kreutzer had already resolved to tell this story, Gentle Monster cannot be seen completely separate from the infamous case surrounding Florian Teichtmeister. The Austrian actor was convicted in 2023 for possession of child pornography, and not in small quantities. Remarkable detail: Teichtmeister had a role in Kreutzer’s previous film, 2022’s Corsage, in which he played Austrian emperor Franz Joseph. The story came to light after another Austrian film director, Katharina Mückstein, posted an Instagram story saying, “Tonight a perpetrator will be on stage and will be applauded. And there is nothing we can do to counter that.” It was quickly speculated that this could only be about someone who worked on Corsage, which had premiered in Cannes shortly before. Kreutzer confirmed that she had heard rumors about one of the actors on Corsage before production started, but said she wouldn’t be able to act on just rumors. In a way she mirrors her heroine in that her trust was betrayed by the actor, but it makes the fact that she chose this story for her next project a fascinating and somewhat problematic one.

All that said, one thing about Gentle Monster is undeniable: Léa Seydoux’s towering performance as a woman who sees the rug of her life being pulled from under her, leading her to examine the relationship with her husband, the titular monster, the man she thought she knew. Speaking three languages (English, German, and her nattive French), Seydoux goes through anger, frustration, despair, and being utterly defeated without missing a beat. Her shocked realization of what Philip was pulled in for, in a gut-wrenching moment of show-don’t-tell, is a masterclass in restraint as all the aforementioned emotions go through her eyes. Seydoux already has several classic performances to her name, but this might be her best to date, and if there is one reason to see this occasionally unfocused film it’s her masterful performance.